Training Runs to Prioritize When Life Gets Crazy

Audio Transcript

Coach Sinead: Hi everyone. Today’s question is about how to prioritize training sessions when life gets hectic.

Today’s question is from Carl. Carl says,“Life is about to get very hectic for me. On April first, I open a new sports center and I have a lot of responsibility to get everything ready to go.

I am currently working 10 hour days, Monday to Friday, and have done about six hours today. This is going to be the trend over the next few weeks with ten to twelve hour days, for maybe six to seven days per week.

It will be rewarding but in truth I’m not looking forward to it.

I can’t wait to get it done and relax sometime in April. As a consequence of the increased working hours and stress, I’m sure my training will suffer.

My question is, if I have to drop sessions then what do I drop?Should I try and at least aim for getting in a long run and quality session?”

Again, this is a fantastic question that I would bet most of our listeners can probably relate to. First and foremost, I just want to say, congratulations Carl. That’s a huge achievement and you’ve got a very exciting venture ahead of you, by the sounds of it.

You know at RunnersConnect, we really understand that things like these come up when you have a full time job.

You’ve got kids,and you guys have so much on your plates.We understand that often, running is not your first priority.

You guys have so many different priorities so we’re always willing to adjust your schedules as needed, and we know that a person can only handle so much stress at any given time.

We like to use the glass of water and analogy when it comes to your stress threshold. Everyone has a ton of different stresses within any given day, whether they be good or bad stresses; they all contribute to that glass.

And then when you put stress from running on top of it, you have to be careful that you are not exceeding your stress threshold.

In other words, you’re not filling the glass past the brim. So you’re of course able to increase your stress threshold as you continue into your training cycle and your training continues to intensify. But, if you exceed the stress threshold at any given point, you’re putting yourself at a greater risk for injury, making yourself more susceptible to illness.

You’re really not going to see the results you want in running or in any other area of your life. You have to be careful with that. This is where we are more than happy to work with you and adjust your training as need be.

As far as which training sessions to prioritize over the others, this really depends on what you’re training for.

So for instance, if you’re training for something like the 5K or the 10K, that requires a little more speed work and some VO2 max specific workouts, then you really need to make sure you are emphasizing those in your week.

On the other hand, if you are training for something like the half marathon or the marathon as our questioner is, you really want to make sure you are putting emphasis on the long run and any sort of aerobic threshold session, like tempo runs and steady state runs, long interval workouts and those types of things.

You really need to make sure that you’re preparing well for those days and you’re able to attack them on all fronts. You’ve gotten plenty of sleep before the workout, you have eaten properly, and hydrated properly.

You just have to make sure that those days remain intact and that you are trying to keep the quality there.

If you are training for something more like the 5K or the 10K or maybe even the 3K or the mile, that’s where the long run becomes a little less important.

You don’t need to work as much on your aerobic capacity for those races obviously.

You do need to touch more on the paces more specific to those workouts.So, oftentimes, if you’ve built up a good foundation and you’ve done a lot of mileage in the early parts of the season, then you can kind of fall back on that and coast on it a little bit when life becomes hectic, because you have accumulated all of that aerobic strength from the earlier phases of your training cycle.

If you have to drop a few long runs, then you’re not going to lose a whole lot of fitness. You’ll still maintain that aerobic strength that you built up over the first part of the season.

As for marathon training on the other hand, you do have to make sure those long runs stay in place and you continue emphasizing those runs.

I will say you can’t take out those recovery runs completely. They are there for a purpose.

They are there for aerobic conditioning and also to help facilitate recovery in between your harder sessions so you have to keep those in place.

If you have to reduce your mileage a little bit here and there, and maybe even replace some runs with some cross training, take a day off if you need it. You have to make sure that you are never exceeding your stress threshold at any given point.

If you’ve had a particularly stressful day for instance, and you have a workout scheduled for that day, I would say maybe replace it with an easy run instead, and just go for a nice enjoyable stress free easy run.

With what you have on your plate right now, and a lot of our listeners can definitely relate, sometimes life just all comes together at once and produces a lot of stress and you have to make sure that you are being wary of your stress threshold.

You can’t overdo it and expect all the results at once. You definitely have to be careful with that but I would just place emphasis on those two sessions throughout the week; your long run and at least one quality workout day.

And then for easy days, if you have to drop a few miles here and there, or if you have to take a few days off here and there, don’t sweat it too much.

You’re not going to lose a lot of fitness and you will be keeping your glass below the brim. You have to be careful about that.

Thank you so much for your question Carl.

I hope I’ve given you some good tips to use over these next few hectic weeks. I know that you are a Runners Connect member, so as always, please communicate with our coaches.

They will be happy to adjust your training as need be. If you’re having a rough day and you need to alter something a little bit, we’re always happy to work with you on that.

If you have a question you’d like us to answer in a future podcast, please submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily. We would love to help you out.

Again, if you’ve been enjoying this podcast, please consider subscribing or leaving us a review at iTunes or your favorite podcast directory.

This would really help us out and we would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you all so much again for joining me today. I hope your training is going well and you have a fantastic weekend.

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